Singapore Cultural Industries

My second aim in this paper is to examine the reception of and attempts to negotiate (and at times, contest) these policies by "cultural practitioners" themselves. In so doing, I will illustrate how there is a severe disjuncture between the state's policies and the intents of practitioners, which may be appropriately cast as a conflict between social and cultural development priorities as envisaged by the practitioners as opposed to economic development priorities as embodied in the state's cultural economic policies.

My analyses in this paper are motivated as much by a perceived lacuna in the academic literature as a commitment to policy analysis. Much of the literature on cultural policies, particularly cultural economic policies and the regeneration of cities, has focused on Western countries, mainly in the U.S. and Europe, and more recently, the U.K. and Australia (Frith, 1991; Watson, 1991; Bassett, 1993; Bianchini, 1993a; Scott, 1997; Williams, 1997). Most of the work examines the historical development of cultural policy, often highlighting early tendencies to neglect the economic potential of the arts and subsequent discovery and appropriation as a response to global capital restructuring. Some recent works have begun to explore the interconnections between capitalist production processes and the cultural content of outputs, and how this is reflected in the growth and development of particular places (Scott, 1997; Waterman, 1998).

At a more micro-level of analysis, others have examined specific aspects of cultural industries, such as the contribution of the cultural industries sector to employment and trade (Pratt, 1997a; 1997b), and economic organisation of particular cultural industries (for example, Sadler, 1997, on the music industry). Such analyses have been kept distinct from examinations of cultural policies from the perspective of socio-cultural and political agendas. Where such research has been done, particularly in non-Western, developing country contexts, the tendency has been to focus on questions of cultural imperialism: addressing questions about whether there is in fact cultural imperialism at work, and attempts by states through policy and various actions to halt or at least ameliorate such impacts (see, for example, Wallis and Malm, 1984; and Shuker, 1994). Little work has been done which focuses on the intersection between cultural economic policies and those cultural policies which bear socio-cultural and political agendas. In the context of Singapore, no systematic attention has been given to analysis of cultural policies (see, however, Koh, 1989). Particularly given Singapore's penchant towards developmentalism (see below) and its relatively nascent stage in the construction of nationhood, this issue bears scrutiny.